Kenneth Lonergan

Kenneth Lonergan (born October 16, 1962, Bronx, New York, U.S.) is an American film director, screenwriter, and playwright who created compelling, closely observed, character-driven dramas that were grounded in mundane moments of ordinary life.

Lonergan grew up in Manhattan, living with his mother and stepfather, who were both psychiatrists. He attended a private grade school, and during this time he began writing stories. Later a high-school drama teacher encouraged him to write plays, and, when he was 18, one of his plays, The Rennings Children, was chosen for the Young Playwrights Festival. He initially attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut before transferring to the dramatic-writing program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (B.F.A., 1986). After graduation he cofounded the theatre company Naked Angels and supported himself by writing scripts for industrial films for companies that included Fuji Films and Weight Watchers.

Lonergan’s first successful play was This Is Our Youth, an expansion of an earlier one-act play, Betrayal by Everyone. A story about disaffected young people in the early 1980s, it opened Off-Broadway in 1996 with Mark Ruffalo in the lead role. His next play, The Waverly Gallery, about a young man whose grandmother, a gallery owner, is disappearing into dementia, opened Off-Broadway in 2000 and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Lobby Hero, centring on a security guard for an apartment building, debuted in 2001. All three of these plays were later staged on Broadway—This Is Our Youth in 2014–15, Lobby Hero in 2018, and The Waverly Gallery in 2018–19—and all were nominated for Tony Awards for best revival. Lonergan later wrote and directed The Starry Messenger, which opened in 2009 with Matthew Broderick portraying an astronomy instructor trying to escape the ordinariness of his life.

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During this time Lonergan also pursued a movie career. His story about a mob boss seeing a psychiatrist became the film Analyze This (1999). He then wrote and directed You Can Count on Me (2000), in which Ruffalo played the ne’er-do-well brother of a stressed single mother (Laura Linney). Lonergan earned an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay. He also wrote the screenplay for the little-seen animated movie The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle (2000). Lonergan contributed to the Oscar-nominated script for Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002) before writing and directing Margaret, about a teenage girl (Anna Paquin) whose distraction of a bus driver (Ruffalo) results in a fatal accident. It was filmed in 2005, but editing disagreements between Lonergan and the studio—which led to three lawsuits—delayed the movie’s release to 2011. Although it was largely overlooked by moviegoers, some critics hailed it as a masterpiece.

Lonergan then wrote and directed Manchester by the Sea (2016). The movie starred Casey Affleck as a reclusive janitor who is unexpectedly required to raise his late brother’s teenage son. It earned widespread critical praise and was successful at the box office. Lonergan won an Academy Award for best original screenplay and was also nominated for directing. In addition, the movie received a nod for best picture. Lonergan later wrote the TV miniseries Howards End (2017–18), based on the E.M. Forster novel.